Race,Immorality and Money in the American Baha'i Community: Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly

This article analyses the dissolution of the Baha'i local assembly of Los Angeles in 1986–88 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this move focused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline, but local interviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflict had two roots: the globalisation of the community and resultant ethnic conflict among whites, African–Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; and national/local conflicts over power and money. Low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship and difficulties in acknowledging social conflict were the causes of these episodes in the Baha'i religion.     

Recent frege studies

MICHAEL D. RESNIK, Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. 244 pp. $16.50.

HANS D. SLUGA, Gottlob Frege. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. xi + 203 pp. £ 12.95.     

Task dependent modulation of exogenous attention: Effects of target duration and intervening events

Inhibition of return (IOR) consists of slower reaction times in response to stimuli appearing at previously attended or inspected locations. The exact mechanisms underlying the effect have not yet been determined. In the present work, we manipulated two variables, target duration and intervening event (fixation cue between cue and target), through which we modulated the IOR effect as a function of task. When the target was presented until response, the presence of an intervening event made the cueing effect more negative in all tasks, although facilitation in the absence of an intervening event was only observed in discrimination and go–no-go tasks. When the target duration was 50 ms, the effect of the intervening event on cueing was also only observed for the discrimination and go–no-go tasks. Target duration had no effect at all in the discrimination task. Possible mechanisms for these modulations (detection cost and spatial selection benefit, both of which are based on cue–target integration processes) are discussed.     

Reception of experimental pedagogy and psychology in Chile. Analysis of the intellectual influences of Wilhelm Mann, 1904–1915

This article provides a detailed analysis of the intellectual research project of Wilhelm Mann, one of the pioneers of experimental and educational psychology in Chile. Mann's work has been the object of so little analysis that his intellectual influences and networks are not clearly known. We analyzed 338 intratext citations from 22 works by Wilhelm Mann published during the period 1904–1915. As a result, we obtained a mapping of his cooperation networks and used a quantitative approach to study the authors who most influenced his career, among whom were William Stern, Herbert Spencer, Wilhelm Wundt, Alfred Binet, and Ernst Meumann. Mann was closely connected to the international and contemporary advances and discussions of his time, despite the lack of infrastructure and difficulties in communication. Mann was the first psychologist to develop a long-term project in Chile that aimed to measure the individualities of Chilean students and their intellectual development.     

Categoricity Theorems and Conceptions of Set

Two models of second-order ZFC need not be isomorphic to each other, but at least one is isomorphic to an initial segment of the other. The situation is subtler for impure set theory, but Vann McGee has recently proved a categoricity result for second-order ZFCU plus the axiom that the urelements form a set. Two models of this theory with the same universe of discourse need not be isomorphic to each other, but the pure sets of one are isomorphic to the pure sets of the other.This paper argues that similar results obtain for considerably weaker second-order axiomatizations of impure set theory that are in line with two different conceptions of set, the iterative conception and the limitation of size doctrine.     

Mental maps in memory retrieval and comprehension.

How do people use spatial information stored in maps? This question has been explored in a number of domains, such as memory and language comprehension, with differing results. Some studies of how experimentally learned maps are organised in memory, using primed recognition, have found temporal information to influence mental map organisation. In contrast, studies of narrative comprehension, using probe identification and anaphoric reading times, have observed spatial effects. This study combines these two research traditions and shows that the organisation observed in long-term memory differs from the organisation in narrative comprehension, even when both tasks refer to the same map.     

Semantic and associative priming in picture naming

We report four picture-naming experiments in which the pictures were preceded by visually presented word primes. The primes could either be semantically related to the picture (e.g., "boat" - TRAIN: co-ordinate pairs) or associatively related (e.g., "nest" - BIRD: associated pairs). Performance under these conditions was always compared to performance under unrelated conditions (e.g., "flower" - CAT). In order to distinguish clearly the first two kinds of prime, we chose our materials so that (a) the words in the co-ordinate pairs were not verbally associated, and (b) the associate pairs were not co-ordinates. Results show that the two related conditions behaved in different ways depending on the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) separating word and picture appearance, but not on how long the primes were presented. When presented with a brief SOA (114 ms, Experiment 1), the co-ordinate primes produced an interference effect, but the associated primes did not differ significantly from the unrelated primes. Conversely , with a longer SOA (234 ms, Experiment 2) the co-ordinate primes produced no effect, whereas a significant facilitation effect was observed for associated primes, independent of the duration of presentation of the primes. This difference is interpreted in the context of current models of speech production as an argument for the existence, at an automatic processing level, of two distinguishable kinds of meaning relatedness.